Generally, scheduling appointments for healthcare services, in particular, requires calling the appropriate office of the service provider to coordinate an appointment time. The call to the appropriate office requires negotiating dates in which the service provider's availability matches that of the healthcare consumer. Traditionally, the consumer must rely upon the dates and times provided by the service provider and the service provider's scheduling software for completing the scheduling event. Oftentimes the consumer is not supplied with the full schedule of availability of the service provider and frequently has to schedule far in advance to find open time slots. Moreover, these conventional methodologies are service-provider-centric and do not allow customization by the consumer.
Conventionally, manually scheduling methods and/or software scheduling systems divide each day into blocks that can be assigned to consumers, usually on a first come first serve basis. However, this methodology experiences some shortcomings. Most service providers will strive to book every slot on a given day to ensure maximum profitability, which can result in overbookings and/or significant wait times if the service provider gets delayed, if appointments go over the booking time, and/or if the service provider gets detained on another matter. Once a delay has started it has a chain reaction throughout the remaining schedule, causing delays for the consumers with upcoming appointments on the schedule without providing means to mitigate the initial or subsequent delays. Instead, each subsequent consumer in that work day schedule will be adversely affected by the delay. Additionally, traditional scheduling methodologies and systems do not take into account consumer cancellations, rescheduling, etc. Accordingly, existing systems and methodologies cannot optimize the schedule in the situations that a consumer cancels and/or reschedules their appointment, resulting in wasted time and lost revenue for the service provider. Additionally, high volume service providers have too many consumers on a daily basis to efficiently track and optimize the schedule through the use of human organizing activities alone. Overall, long wait times and difficultly scheduling appointments can lead to frustrated consumers and reduced throughput.